Free-diving and Yoga as existential tools for living in anxious times.
We live in uncertain times. Our predictions cannot keep up with our pretensions. The world around us shrinks as our need to consume grows ever more insatiable.
We carry phones that are more intelligent and sophisticated than we will ever need to be, but use them mostly to keep up with the growing demands of social networks.
We can see into the furthest reaches of space and deep into the smallest particles of matter, but we find it very difficult to look into ourselves.
Human living has become incredibly sophisticated as our tools for living have become ever more intelligent. If intelligence is a measure of how skilfully one can manipulate and interpret information it can be said that our tools have become intelligent than us.
Intelligence can apportion values but does not comprehend ultimate value, a computer cannot give the meaning of a beautiful symphony nor the moral tragedy of a war-orphaned child. A sense of beauty and meaning cannot come from technology, it comes only from the wisdom of the human heart.
In this time of economic crashes and natural and man-made calamities we will never find meaning or happiness from our rapidly mutating technologies. We must find it in the same place as we have always found it, inside ourselves. Not in egocentric wallowing, but deep inside ourselves where we are all the same human, regardless of culture, class or colour.
We must find our freedom inside the mind and body and to do this we need to know the mind and body. The mind and body are not fixed entities, they are in constant flux. The human being is an infinitely complex interplay of physical, energetic and mental phenomena.
Our problems arise when the interplay becomes stagnant or rigid, resulting in physical and mental sickness and emotional unhappiness. When our body is clogged with toxins and our thoughts become rigid and inflexible, the body loses health. Life loses spontaneity, becoming suffocating. When that happens even a brand new I phone won’t help.
In this age of uncertainty, on so many levels the key to surviving on this Blue planet is fluid living. We must look to the water and learn from it.
With yoga we can bring fluidity to the physical body, with free-diving, pranayama and meditation we can look inside, developing fluidity on the mental and energetic levels. On a social level as our world changes in ways we can barely believe we must flow with the changes and develop new answers, without clinging to the comfort of our habitual reactions.
(DISCLAIMER; Obviously if I said that Yoga and free-diving were the answer to all the ills of the world, I would have to be taking the piss. But the qualities that Yoga and free-diving cultivate when practised with the right mindset are ones that are very useful as we hurtle deeper into the twenty first century.)
If it’s not inside you you’ll never find it outside.
Come to Amed in Bali and learn yoga and free-diving. They are life enriching activites and very useful tools for coping with the impending apocalypse ;).